Album Review: Liars by Liars

Review Summary: Liars go pop on their self-titled fourth album. Fans and/or followers of Liars have hopefully learned by now that to have any understanding of the band at all, you need to expect the unexpected. For those unfamiliar with the band's history, they began their career in New York with their debut They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument On Top and were soon lumped in with the other dance-punk bands of their city that were growing in popularity at the time, despite that the album was more vicious, angular and demanding than any of its peers.

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After the lathered clamor of 2006's Drum's Not Dead and 2004's challenging They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, it was evolve or die for Liars. Indeed, the Brooklyn trio's fourth album has made it out of the terrible twos, and growing pains have produced a curious pastiche. Opener "Plaster Casts of Everything" arouses the primal dance-punk fear of their debut via jackhammer drums and "Freak Out" is undeniably the Jesus & Mary Chain.

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And here we see the inevitable fallout of innovation, the embrace of originality giving way. Liars got underway in 2000 and quickly became one of the flagship bands (among the Rapture, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Walkmen, as well as the Strokes before them) as NYC’s selfless response to the distress call of a rock scene on its last legs. They were also the first band to really take a critical hit for following their whims under the mantle of rock music, as 2004’s They Were Wrong, So We Drowned sank into the mud, a pariah that scattered the group across continents.

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